Handling rss redirects with Python/urllib2

Question

Calling urrlib2.urlopen on a link to an article fetched from an RSS feed leads to the following error:

urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 301:

Answer 1

Turns out you need to enable Cookies. The page redirects to itself after setting a cookie first. Because urllib2 does not handle cookies by default you have to do it yourself.

import urllib2
import urllib
from cookielib import CookieJar

cj = CookieJar()
opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
p = opener.open("http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=8cd5af579b320b0bfd695ddcc344d96c")

print p.read()

Answer 2

Nothing wrong with @sleeplessnerd's solution, but this is very, very slightly more elegant:

import urllib2
url = "http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9926023/handling-rss-redirects-with-python-urllib2"
p = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor).open(url)

print p.read()

In fact, if you look at the inline documentation for the CookieJar() function, it more-or-less tells you to do things this way:

You may not need to know about this class: try urllib2.build_opener(HTTPCookieProcessor).open(url)